A.P. Bio Is a Brilliant Show That Deserved Better

"To be perfectly clear, this won't be one of those things where, over the course of a year, I secretly teach it to you," new substitute teacher Jack Griffin (Glenn Howerton) tells his A.P. Bio high school class. "This also won't be one of those things where I end up learning more from you than you do from me." This is how NBC's A.P. Bio begins: Blowing up what we've come to expect from a frosty teacher-student dynamic, and installing something much more nihilist at its core. Jack does not much care for his class, and certainly doesn't want to teach biology, so he strikes a deal with his kids: Help him take down his nemesis, get reinstated as a professor of philosophy at Harvard, and leave his hated hometown of Toledo, Ohio, and they all get As, provided they keep their mouths shut about this woefully unrealistic but episodic-friendly arrangement.

Mike O'Brien, formerly of SNL, created the series, which just finished its second (and, most likely, final) season on NBC. Given how weird and prickly the show can be at times, much like Jack, it's a minor miracle it got so far. Nevertheless, it's been killed far too soon, and maybe you checking it out on Hulu might be the perfect thing to get it a third season somewhere, anywhere, down the line. Do it for me.

Anyway, back to it: A rocky first few episodes eventually give way to one of the funniest shows on TV in the past few years; the school faculty itself is beset by well-meaning idiots. Paula Pell as Helen Henry Demarcus, the school administrator, is a particular standout. She's just so happy to be there, helping kids, and assisting her beloved principal Durbin (Patton Oswalt, the beating heart of the show) however she can. During Jack's sexual harassment training, she asks Jack to identify all her "honkables," followed by his own. "I know you know!" she says in a cheerfully sing-song voice while he hesitates.

Howerton doesn't necessarily play against his established type as Jack Griffin, every bit the cunning manipulator as Dennis Reynolds. Still, like it or not, the dude's not a sociopath, and finds himself occasionally tricked into helping—even caring about—the teen nerds he's been saddled with. "Just say the word 'Dumbledore' and they'll all go nuts," he advises a jock having trouble fitting in with the smarter kids.

Griffin's classroom is really where the show goes from good to great. The kids are, across the board, brilliant (though very obviously played by actors mostly in their mid-20s, such are the demands of TV casting.) It's hard to pick a favorite, or even a top three. Aparna Brielle as Sarika Sarkar, perhaps the most academic of the lot, is a humorless foil to Jack. Eddie Leavy as Anthony is a weary, confident young man who doesn't seem to care much about either Jack or the class's aims. Allisyn Ashley Arm's Heather might just be the best, though: A perpetually horny, foul-mouthed teen who dresses in cardigans and the thickest set of nerd glasses you've ever seen. When Jack tasks his students with catfishing Miles, his Harvard nemesis, Heather volunteers to draft a message to him on a dating app. It reads as such: "Hey boy, you're smooth like butter dripping off of chocolate. Gonna lick you up and down. Drip. Slurp. Yum." It continues like that for a while. "Now, bear in mind this is the first message he will be receiving from a total stranger," Jack announces to the class after a shocked pause.

This being network TV, Jack does begin to soften to his wards over the show's 26 episode run, as fun as it would be to watch a grown man bully an entire classroom of children for years on end. O'Brien and his writing team make spending time with the characters so much fun, it barely even matters what the plot of the week is. Hell, sometimes there's barely one at all. But that's a feature, not a bug. A.P. Bio is secretly one of the best comedies network TV has seen in a long time, and if you haven't already, it's time to spend time with its unapologetically self-realized characters, and maybe save the show in the process.

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